Honey Bee and Food Supply Agriculture Facts

One of every three bites the average American eats is directly attributed to honey bee pollination

• Honey bees are responsible for the pollination of more than 100 crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, providing 80 percent of the country’s pollination services
• The honey bee is responsible for pollinating $15 billion in agricultural crops each year. The California almond crop alone uses 1.3 million colonies of bees for pollination, approximately one half of all the honey bees in the United States
• California is the largest producer of agricultural products with an estimated annual total gross crop value of $30.5 billion; Pennsylvania is also a major player in the agricultural world, with a total annual crop value of $4.5 billion

Honey bees, the unsung heroes of food production, dance far and wide for our favorite fruits, nuts and berries

• Honey bees are the only insect that produce food for humans, flying approximately 15 mph and visiting about 50-100 flowers in each pollination trip
• When a honey bee returns to the hive, it gives out samples of the flower’s nectar to its hive mates. Then it performs a dance that identifies the distance, direction, quality, and quantity of the food supply.  The richer the food source, the longer and more vigorous the dance
• The principal form of communication among honey bees is through chemicals called pheromones

A single bee cannot make honey, it takes a whole hive

• An average worker bee will only make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime
• One honey bee colony can produce 60 to 100 pounds of honey per year
• To produce 1 pound of honey, honey bees must visit 2 million flowers and fly 55,000 miles

The A, Bee, C’s of Honey Bees

• Preceding humans by millions of years, the oldest bee fossil dates back more than 100 million years. Flowering plants appeared about 65 million years ago
• Humans have been associated with honey bees since the era of cave men, and ancient societies in Egypt and Israel kept bee colonies for honey production
• Apis mellifera, a honey bee’s scientific name, literally means “the honey-carrying bee”, but in actuality bees carry pollen on their hind legs in an area know as a pollen basket or corbicula
• An average hive can hold about 50,000 bees; a combination of drones (male bees) and worker bees (non-queen female bees)
• Honey bees pass through four distinct life stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult
• A queen bee can live for 2-5 years, a worker bee 1-4 months and a drone 40-50 days